Obamacrap, Trade Plutocrap

Abstract: If you thought Obamacare, drawn in secrecy, with deliberate lying, was bad, hold on tight!

Obamacrap, the gift that keeps on giving:

[As a reminder, lest my mood be misconstrued, I am 100% for single payer public universal health care. One could get there safely, and rather quickly using Medicare and executive orders.]

Obama about Obamacare today November 14, 2013: “I get accused of a lot of things but I don’t think I am stupid enough to go around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. Clearly we and I did not have enough awareness…”

“We and I“? Stand reassured, Mr. Resident: you are more aware and less stupid than you look. Or are just words falling out of your mouth? (As someone who knew Obama 40 years ago, suggested to me, the haphazard falling of the words, used to be, even then, a characteristic of Obama.)

How did he get to become president of the USA? Someone asked me, today. Bear with me, it gets clearer, further down.

Obamacare is PHILOSOPHICALLY erroneous. You can’t force the PUBLIC to pay private profiteers. All the deliberate lying by the Liar In Chief and his corporate shills cannot change this.

An army of liars led by a Liar In Chief do not one truth make, if they can help it.

Why does not the website work? Greed. Because it’s all corrupted by the search for profits, like the rest of the Obamacare monstrosity. 600 million dollars, just for the (non functionning) site. And counting, now that Google and Oracle have put their greedy fingers all over the deal.

***

Is Trade An Absolute Good?

Well, yes, if and only if, it is fair. Brazil produces chicken at rock bottom prices, thanks to mass cultivation of corn and soy, while paying workers 350 euros a month. Then the chickens are sent worldwide. Right now that’s undercutting the chicken industry in Europe.

And it is not fair. When the European chicken industry is dead, the plutocrats at the other end will be free to jack up prices.

Then take the price of chicken arriving in Europe, and slap on top of it a tax equal to (A + B + C).

***

Why is the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership’s elaboration secret? Because Plutos can’t thrive without it.

The TPP is NAFTA on steroids. It involves 12 Pacific Rim countries, minus China. The negotiations have been kept secret but WikiLeaks, and others, have leaked draft copies revealing the true intent.

Although the TPP is called a trade agreement it is more of a corporate rights agreement.

Only two of the 26 chapters under negotiation have to do with trade. The other 24 include how a government regulates corporate activity, what for profit corporations can and cannot do, how long pharmaceutical patents or copyright terms should be, how the Internet is governed, the sharing of personal information across borders, banking and tax rules, plus how plutocrats should be compensated when environmental or health policies interfere with their profits.

Only three government individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted exclusive access to crucial sections of the treaty text.

Three on the government side, six hundreds on the plutocratic side. Call that pure plutocracy, full anti-democracy. without transparency, you can’t have democracy. Pericles and his philosophical advisers pointed that out, nearly 24 centuries ago.

Obama, and other leaders, want to sign and ratify the TPP before the end of 2013.

Besieged WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange stated: “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly.” The advanced draft of the 95-page, 30,000-word Intellectual Property Rights Chapter institutes a transnational legal and enforcement regime, replacing existing laws.

The longest section of the Chapter – ’Enforcement’ – is devoted to detailing new policing measures, with implications for individual rights, civil liberties, publishers, internet service providers and internet privacy, as well as for the creative, intellectual, biological and environmental commons. Measures proposed include supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but without human rights safeguards. It is stated that these courts will conduct hearings with secret evidence. The IP Chapter also replicates many of the surveillance and enforcement provisions withdrawn in the past under protests.

Thus probably the attraction of trying secrecy, and a sly maneuver.

We saw how well that worked with Obamacare.

Assange: “If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

How come Assange did not die yet?

Believing the plutocrats increasingly looks like the road to a world war, said Mario Soares, the 90 years old ex-Prime Minister and President of Portugal, post-dictatorship. Soares feels and thinks that the situation now is more terrible than under the 60 year-long Salazar fascist dictatorship.

***

What minds infuriated by fascism do in war:

The 20, 21 to 22 August 40,000 French soldiers died in Belgium, north-east of Sedan. In just one commune, in just one battle, in just one day, the 22 August, 27,000 attacking French soldiers died, killed by artillery.

Infuriated German troops burned Belgian houses. If you want to infuriate fascists, just resist them. That reminds them they are very bad people, they get even more angry.

In just one village, 94 civilians were shot, two were burned alive, for good measure. Within a front of 25 kilometers, another 500 civilians were lined up and shot. Jeanne Jacob, 2 years old, was killed with her dad, as they were hiding by the river.

Why all these incredible horrors? Just because the Kaiser had ordered to wipe out the French Republic. Top German generals, infuriated by the suicidal resistance of the French army, took vengeance on Belgian civilians.

French, Belgian, British, Italian, and American troops did not commit atrocities in World War One (although, later, when Italy fell under the control of the ex-socialist, the fascist Benito Mussolini, Italian troops did commit atrocities).

French and British troops did not commit atrocities in WWII either (although they were both victims of Nazi atrocities; and not just the troops including other “races”; when the Nazis were winning, in May 1940, infuriated, once again, by the effrontery of British resistance, the Nazis killed at some point 95 Brits who had surrendered, among other cases like that; the cases involving the French run in the thousands of troops assassinated after having surrendered, just in 1940; OK, all right, after being stopped by French “colonial” troops that surrendered only after running out of ammunitions, after blocking Rommel’s 7th Panzer, the Nazis were justly infuriated: justice as fairness, Nazi style).

Don’t worry, the Plutos are not going to jail. That’s not done among gens de bien.

***

Trust Typhoons Not

Huge ocean-going ships 400 meters inland in the Philippines, next to each other, thrown there by super typhoon Haiyan. Filipinos are very expert in the way of typhoons. After all, they live in “Hurricane Alley“. They are used to it, with an average of 20 typhoons a year.

So strong was the typhoon, that, those who trusted officialdom and made it to the local school, made to resist typhoons, came out swimming after the seven meters tidal wave struck.

No. It’s rather an absolute candy. Pessimism is a greater good, and learning to live positively with it, while looking at reality, straight in the eye, an even more precious gift. In other words, the exact opposite of how Obama, the unelected European Commission, and all the secret commissions, NSA and assorted death panels, wants us to live.

Dear Gena: I guess you are talking about the late Obamacare? Well, it’s over. It was indeed the chance of a lifetime to avoid Medicare For All, and it worked perfectly that way. Amen.

OK, Obama proposes that he was “stupid enough”, although he is not sure, to have understood nothing about what happened. OK, whatever. It’s neither a start, nor an alternative. You should read my “Obamascare” carefully.

Watch the plutocrats in the PBS picture I used. Baucus owns a 125,000 acres ranch, the woman, Liz Fowler, wrote Obamacrap herself. She was Vice President at the world’s largest for-profit insurance company. Yes, Vice. Chance of a lifetime for vice. Better than before for Plutos, indeed.
PA

I was at the dentist yesterday, together with Jean. While waiting for Jean to finish, I was casually chatting to the receptionist. Aged 35, she was a married woman, they had 3 children, twin boys aged 5 and an 8-year-old girl.

I took a deep breath and asked her what she made of today’s world. She replied she was very worried, especially for the children. Going on to say she voted but it was pointless because too many others disagreed with her. I left it at that.

So my question to you, Patrice, is this. What’s your instinct, your intuition, as to whether this typical American family of five have a chance of a reasonable future? (Of course, I should define ‘reasonable’ but you get the general idea.)

Well, dear Paul, I think that the USA is in much better situation to resist the incoming catastrophe than any other polity in the world, just because of geography.

It’s not difficult to draw this conclusion. Then, of course, the USA, especially its leading plutocracy, will inherit the Earth. I feel reasonably confident that, at the very least, this feeling is shared by many in the elite. That’s why they do all they can, whether thy feel it, or not, to accelerate the catastrophe.

Obamacare is not the New Deal. it’s the Old Deal: plutocrats own and control all, even your health, with the help of the IRS. I talked to many people of the underclass, they are thoroughly unimpressed.

Obamacare is the USA at its ugliest; all the lessons, from ALL the developed countries in health care were ignored. So Obamacare is a form of bigotry: you foreigners are worthless, because you did not listen to our geniuses, our own plutocrats, watch them with the IRS at their beck and call. Thus the man eating sharks themselves wrote a new “law”… Which starts to become history. Today.

Obama did Obamacare so he could avoid Medicare For All. Nancy Pelosi, owner of wineries and a ski resort, helped him in the that subtlity. The sheeple bleated its satisfaction.

My own employer health plans got cancelled weeks ago. The New York Times refused to publish that, for weeks, censoring ALL my comments. The Liar In Chief may have an army of liars, but armies of liars cannot one truth make. This is fun.
PA

Dear Gena: BTW, president Klingon, I mean Clinton, between two skirts, demolished the New Deal, thanks to the goons, Rubin, Greenspan, Summers. Serious: they gutted the Banking Act of 1933, on which the whole New Deal rested.

Oblahblah followed his orders, and was careful not to reinstitute the New Deal. There is no New Deal, just sheeple bleating hopefully about the change they can believe in.

The crap will still be around, Obamacare will survive in name only. But it was always clear to me it could not work. It just crumbled before taking off. we can’t even describe that as a crash.
So Obamacrash will still be around in 2014. it’s not clear to me that massively lying to the American people, deliberately is not an impeachable, offense, though…
PA

Jamie Dimon used to rule Obama and that meant the world to him. Now he should just go to jail under the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act (see my section on JP Morgan in the last Aphorism set, Nov 15, above… happy to feel that you think the world is listening. I had hot exchanges with the silly censors at the New York Times. They denied they were censoring, but they did not indicate a word for it.

The Banking Act of 1933 (“G-S”) was clear and simple, like half a page. It went parsecs further than the Volcker rule.

In 2006, the IRS code was like 6,000 pages. It has exploded under Obama beyond 90,000 pages, 90,000 of which are about legalizing tax evasion. They are trying to do the same for banks, and now health care, as everybody can see. All this is creating a sort of Stalinism for profiting endured plutocrats, a bit as if Lenin had instituted a dictatorship to serve the Tsar.

You leave me an hour in the Oval Office, and I would revolutionize USA health care with a number of executive orders impossible to reverse (because they would be too popular). The real aim of Obamacare was to protect health gougers.
PA

There are people right now trying to reinstate Glass-Steagall and implement the Volker rule. I try and be optimistic. Jamie Diamond may think he rules the world but we know better. Keep educating people are listening. The bullies don’t want people to know.

Sometimes it is instructive to simply keep track of who is usually right and who is usually wrong regarding future outcomes.

It is good to have a firm understanding of the historical past, but if that knowledge can not be applied intuitively to what is most likely to happen in the future, then one is still quite lost.
I actually had you in mind, while writing that status update.

A comment of mine did not make it through, so here is it again in terser form:

good job on the PTT. Do you propose to enlighten us also about the ongoing/looming (nobody knows) “talks” about EU/US trade “liberalization”? The felonious Euro Commissionners under the weasel sellout Barroso are intent to give Pluto the citadel keys on a silver platter, with Hollande and Merkel looking away. The consequences will be much worse than simply having to turn vegan to avoid chemically fed beef and chemically dipped chicken (labelling of those being forbidden as per Pluto’s orders). This may be the last dike before Europe goes under as planned.

Sorry about the lost comment. I hate it when that happens. The other day a mail to a friend got lost, and since then I did not re-write one (some forces took control of my other computer… Should be against the law…. I think it actually is, but not in the USA, where I sit as happy as a simmering lobster.)

I am FOR the EU-USA accord. I suggested it, long long ago. HOWEVER, I am 100% AGAINST doing it in secrecy. The whole point is to do it publicly, for the educational experience.

My guess, it will not happen, in secrecy, because there will be blood in the streets soon. Or rather berets rouges all over. Obama is trying to catch up with Hollande impopularity, but it’s hard…
PA

Don’t get me wrong, I am for such an agreement in principle. But as it presents itself now, with only too obvious “hidden” agendas and the EU’s hand delivered neatly to US representatives courtesy of the NSA, it is a PLANNED disaster, ie an act of war (1). Publicity would help, but a strong dose of spine East of the Atlantic would help even more.

(1) my lost post alluded to Obama’s executive order re car parts to Iran. In a nutshell he’s paving the way to GM’s foothold in Iran while flushing Peugeot out of the picture. When Pluto espouses Colbertism, it’s not in half-measures.

It is now certain that European economic indicators will get WORSE than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So? well, this comes greatly from following, not Germany (as Krugman would have it), but Wall Street. That is Barroso, Rehn, and company. And all those who think the ECB’s charter is smart. (I give credit to Dragghi to have stretched the envelope as much as he could/can).

The article closes thus:
“Perhaps there’s still hope. Between Harry Reid’s recent comments and Pelosi’s epiphany, there seems to be a growing understanding of the problem, and its solution, in some parts of Congress.

But first, we will have to get rid of the obstructionist politicians whose only interest seems to be in preserving a health insurance industry that has become one of the most destructive forces in American society.

That task is up to us.”

Physician Philip Caper of Brooklin is a founding board member of Maine AllCare, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group committed to making health care in Maine universal, accessible and affordable for all. He can be reached at pcpcaper21@gmail.com.

Dear Paul! Thanks for having found those Bangor News, and calling them to my attention. It says exactly some of what I have been saying all along, since the Atrocious Care Act surfaced, more than four years ago. Let me quote an extract:

“Instead of expanding our existing Medicare program, which has been working well for almost 50 years and is our country’s most efficient and least intrusive health care financing program, the ACA creates complex new law that perpetuates and reinforces the chaos and confusion of our hodgepodge of public and private insurance programs. Coverage and financial assistance continue to depend on an individual’s employment status, income, place of residence, age, conjectures about future health status, and many other factors, some of them subject to change with little or no warning and many impossible to predict.

Smooth implementation of the ACA depends upon the ability of many parts of government and thousands of insurance companies to seamlessly communicate with one another and agree on data drawn from myriad different public and private sources. Some in the health insurance field believe such a task will be difficult or impossible to achieve.

We have to ask ourselves, who are the winners from requiring us to go through the expense and confusion inherent in trying to implement a law of over 2,000 pages? The answer is clear. It’s a health insurance industry that profits from complexity and confusion, and providers of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, devices and services who benefit excessively from the very weak cost controls inherent in our fragmented system of paying for services.

The losers are all the rest of us. The ACA’s objective, access to health care for all Americans, could have been accomplished much more easily with far less confusion, expense and complexity.

I talk to a lot of people from across the political spectrum about health care reform. There is a growing consensus that improved Medicare for all is the necessary first step in repairing our badly broken health care system.”

BTW, as far as I know, I was the first one to use the expression “Medicare For All”, and define its importance. As it is Medicare is half of USA health care. Obama could improve it ONE minute. But he won’t; his future fortune depends upon stalling it.
PA

Well, I am unamused that all these people are discovering all this evidence 4 years too late.

The excuse for blindness worked simply: Obama has brown skin, so he is one of the victims, he can do no wrong. It was sheer racism.

Same problem with deliberate drone strikes against civilians, or the so calle “financial reform”, which is nothing towards reinstituting the Banking Act of 1933, demolished by Resident Cliton’s handlers.
PA

Another quote from the same Bangor article written by that physicisn from the Maine Medicare for all:

“During a trip to California last week, I ran into House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. When I explained to her that while I admired her efforts to reform our health care system, I remain an advocate for “Improved Medicare for All,” she responded, “Yes, we should have done single payer.””

Well, they are all extremely filthy hyper rich liars. I was at the very core of the system, and I saw how it worked. Pelosi is a big time plutocrat, masquerading as a concerned friend of 300 million losers. Obama read my stuff, and my objections then were the exact same as today, and as the future consensus will be.

Now plutocrat Pelosi has achieved her aim: Medicare For All delayed more than 8 years, at the very least, and her health care portofolio doing great. And her fellow plutocrats grateful. watch them inviting each other in their mansions.
PA

Thanks Paul for that article! To quote the begining of it:“One of the proofs that Obamacare is really about helping insurers and Big Pharma rather than ordinary Americans is its failure to do much about the seamy practice known as balance billing.

Say you have a scheduled procedure, like getting a stent. Like most Americans who have health insurance, you are in an HMO or a PPO. Your doctor, who is in your network, schedules you for the operation at a hospital in your network. You assume the only thing you need to worry about is a fairly minor co-pay and recovery.

But weeks later, you find that the anesthesiologist wasn’t in your network, and you are hit with a $12,000 bill for his services. And this sort of scamming (hospitals knowingly putting people on a surgical team that they can bill at huge premiums to negotiated rates) is routine. And of course, if the ambulance takes you to an emergency room that is not in your network, the outcome can be catastrophic.

The New York Times went as far as CANCELLING my subscription this Monday, Nov 18. Or as they put it, “EXPIRING” it. It was fully paid for. I had a lawyer call them. She spent 45 minutes in recorded conversation. Somebody called “APE” (I am kidding you not!) had ordered the “expiration” (without compensation).

Finally a supervisor re-instituted the subscription (after trying to restart it only in a few weeks). Unilateral breach of contract for opinion crime, that’s heady stuff…
PA

The ACA, Atrocious Care Act is real gory. Here is more “Naked Capitalism“:

When we’ve described some of the problems with Obamacare, some readers have piped up and insisted, “Oh, but you forget, those costly plans are still really valuable! The most you can pay in 2014 is $6,350 if you are an individual and $12,700 for a family of two or larger.”

That is just not true. Those limits apply ONLY to in-network services. All Obamacare does is nibble around the edges of the balance billing abuse. Families USA summarizes the relevant parts of the ACA Patient’s Bill of Rights:

Although the new law does not completely solve this problem (balance billing), it does make some changes that are designed to minimize your bills for emergency care: It sets some standards for what health plans must pay out-of-network emergency providers, and when providers are paid adequately, they are less likely to balance bill.

Your plan must pay the emergency providers the greatest of these three amounts:

1. The amount it pays in-network providers;
2. A payment based on the same methods the plan uses to pay for other out-of-network services (for example, a percentage of usual and customary fees charged by other providers in your area); or
3. The amount Medicare would pay for that service.

Say get in an accident out of state. You will be hit with a large emergency room bill, and your insurance will pay only a comparatively small portion.

Buried in the New York Times article was a terse assessment:

Still, there’s nothing in the law that stops health care providers from billing consumers for the balance, which is what often happens — and exactly what the D’Andrea family experienced. “This is not an issue that the Affordable Care Act fixes,” said Timothy S. Jost, a professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and expert on health care laws. “It is conceivable that the problem gets worse for some people if the Affordable Care Act encourages narrower networks, which some people think it might do.”

Remember, Romneycare has had only a marginal impact on medical bankruptcies in Massachusetts. And there are reasons to think you could easily have nasty outcomes financial outcomes with Obamacare. I’m getting reports now from parents who are lucky enough to have kids that are under 26 and employed find that their inclusion under their parents’ coverage is not terribly useful if the child’s job isn’t where the parent resides.

dear Alexi: I think you can rephrase this profitably this way: We often forget that the definition of FINANCIAL profit is to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money. One would hope that Obama also forgot that the Financial Times had nothing to do with health care. But, in fact, I think he just did not want to understand.
PA

Excellent find, Paul! Thanks!
They actually repackaged nicely arguments i have used many times in the last 4 years… The insistence that this is an experiment, although there was a proven treatment time, and place multiply tested, I have done many times in the past. But that the patients (all of the USA population) was not informed they were the object of a giant experiment, is something worth insisting upon.

Obama & his Harvard health minions want dying patients, “consumers” “to shop” on the “marketplace” for the “best price”. Are these people demented?